JTouch: Long Live the Hardware Kings

No, Steve Jobs didn't e-invent the i-touchscreen. Apple saw the beauty of the nice, tight little Asian displays, and quickly worked to design an operating system to implement them. But now Google Android and Microsoft have caught up, and I don't know how long it will take for someone in Asia to start making software.

J Touch Corporation is principally engaged in the manufacture and distribution of touch panels. The Company's major products include resistive touch panels, capacitive touch panels and traditional touch panels. The Company's products are applied in the manufacture of smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable navigation devices (PNDs), commercial point of sale (POS) tools and business applications, among others. During the year ended December 31, 2011, the Company obtained approximately 99.68% of its total revenue from touch panels. The Company distributes its products primarily in Asian markets. - Reuters

Find the Taiwanese Executive. I see Japan, I see South Korea, I see China... Working together to produce films and cultural cooperatation. Because these guys don't want a stupid war in Asia, not over Sino/Japanese islands or the Taiwan straight or Korean "unification". They even avoid patent wars, at least better than Americans do.

They are not "outsourced". They ARE the Source. Let's hope they make enough money to buy beef and cars made in America, because the genie ain't going back in the 1955 Display Device catalogue.

Hardware isn't dead. JTouch is a company you never heard of, and they are making a billion dollars a quarter. And they can produce the hardware cheaply enough now to sell it to people earning $6,000 per year. That's a lot of people, a big market, a market bigger than a USA patent lawsuit can leverage.

In fact, the entire story of screen display technology "outsourcing", by Apple, or by whomever, as told by Romney and Obama, is a completely hysterical fiction. IBM stopped making CRT monitors in NY in the early 1990s. And that, my friends, was because Asia already owned the CRT business by then.

"Hardware is Dead"? The king is dead, long live the king. Incredibly good, profoundly useful, and shockingly cheap gadgets are going to change our industry. They won't stop. The question is whether the idea to make them non-repairable is ingrained in the industry now, and whether they will become like light bulbs, produced too cheaply to fix first, then re-designed to fail faster... or whether, mercifully, buyers in the $6000 income bracket won't put up with that. In the USA, display panels are already becoming the new ink cartridge, and we barely finished breakfast. But in Guangzhou, you can buy printed reverse-engineering books which tell you how to repair (or remanufacture, or counterfeit) every electronic device on the market, and if one gets a reputation for being "all glue and no screw," they may find USA and Europe to be their only market.

JTouch to increase revenues in 4Q12 from tablet product orders

Siu Han, Taipei; Alex Wolfgram, DIGITIMES [Thursday 4 October 2012]

Taiwan-based touch panel maker JTouch is expected to see fourth-quarter 2012 revenues hit the highest quarterly level of the year due to increased orders for touch screen panels used in tablets, according to industry sources.

The company is seeing increased orders mainly from international companies such as Samsung Electronics for its 10.1-inch tablets and is increasing its overall proportion of production of touch screen products used in small- to medium-size devices, added the sources.

JTouch has also been improving its production capacity throughout 2012 and is increasing the number of customers from China, added the sources.

JTouch's revenues for the third quarter are estimated at NT$1.4 billion (US$47.7 million), up 40%...

See Digitimes for more

Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) is another company you never heard of. This is how I learn, I look things up, up, up-stream.

Why do we mythologize Wozniak and Jobs making Apple computers in their garage in Cupertino, California, but we shrug off the idea that Asians are inventing stuff? Why does the USA press continue the stereotype that Asian engineersare simply copy-cats and outsourced labor? There are plenty of copycats and outsourcees in Asia, of course. And plenty of every other type of person you can possibly describe, from primitive e-scrap burner to circuit board inventor to Jackie Chan. It's time to put the comic books away and stop making recycling export policy try to resemble a post-war pissing match.